Quick Insights on Twitter’s Advertising Program

Twitter has recently ramped up its advertising program. Twitter’s advertising page highlights the features of the program of various promotions they offer for advertisers.

The screenshot below gives you an idea of how much you actually need to advertise on twitter. The range begins at $5,000. Twitter takes a personal approach and wants to connect with you via phone or email for you to learn more about their advertising program (i.e. you can’t immediately start advertising right from the get go)!

Twitter’s advertising program offers 5 main features:

-Promoted Tweets: appear within timelines and searches.

-Promoted Trends: tweets that appear in trending topics. The idea here is to get a massive amount of people paying attention to trending topics to also see the promoted trend as well. Shall I say it’s like a ‘tweet-o-merical’?

-Promoted Accounts: promote the ‘online affinity’ spirit of twitter by featuring the account in the “who to follow” and search results section of twitter.

-The Enhanced Profile Pages: offers a header banner to brand the profile page along with a featured tweet that you want to have stand out. Consider it a facebook version of a business branded page.

Twitter’s efforts in evolving the platform into a true business tool is admirable. The enhanced profile page and analytics features would tempt me as an advertiser to give it a go.

But the advertising program is not meant for all business owners. Minimum budgets to advertise on Twitter start out at $5,000 a month.

For bootstrapped business owners, Twitter advertising is too expensive; such business owners can stick to good old tweeting and hash tagging. Alternatives include hiring a social media consultant who can work on a company’s twitter handle (which is much cheaper than the $5,000 a month).

There is a lot of potential to get your advertisements seen to many different followers in a short period of time. Many mainstream companies featured on Twitter’s advertising page have found success.

Twitter’s pricey advertising program should not be overlooked in it’s potential to deliver ad messages and increase engagement.

What To Do After You Start Advertising:

Getting into Twitter advertising is great, but there are a few things that small business owners can do to go that extra mile, and make their Twitter advertising and experience better than the competitors:

– Include a Twitter landing page: Don’t just send people to your home page. Create a specific page for Twitter followers to go to. This is a good place to add a form or call to action to gather leads.

– Customize your Twitter background: Consider this Twitter page as an example. Not only is there a customized background, but they’ve used the sidebar as a way to provide additional information about the company. If you need some help putting together a customized Twitter background, then here are the specs.

Formerly at Mashable, Sana Ahmed is a Social Technology Consultant who streamlines technology strategies for business, learning, and personal productivity. She trains digital users on how to take back their technology and get down to business! Sana also contributes to AppAdvice.com, and works on her startups in her spare time.